lunedì 11 febbraio 2013

Beta testing the Apocalypse is a fascinating collection of
the comics Tom Kaczynski published between 2007 and 2011 in the pages
of Eric Reynold's magazine MOME, with a new story added specifically for
this occasion.

The singularity of the comics compiled in this volume is also reflected
by the particularities of the editing of the book itself. The (graphic)
novel starts with a graphic summary in the form of a Carthesian diagram
(a subtle reference to Rem Koolhaas' and Bruce Mau's seminal S, M, L, XL,
on the transnational architectural office OMA) which traces the spatial
and temporal coordinates of each story, anticipating and revealing a
bunch of surprising narrative constellations, while in the last pages
the author offers a list with the names of people, objects, concepts,
movements and theories that are somehow referenced throughout the books,
including links with a pleyade of cultural references ranging from Le
Corbusier to Doctor Who.

All this is packed within a brightly
colored cover that greets the reader with a miniature cityscape which
extends up to the horizon under the oppressive yellow sky on top of
which the title words are written. However, this reduced cityscape is
made of the semiotic detritus of a the nowadays globalized architectural
imaginary: an accumulation of fungible space and apparent
sustainability punctuated by architectural icons from the past and the
present.

As in Schuiten's and Peeters' Brüsel, Kaczinsky's
model-scale city is also walked through by weird giants: technicians in
white coats that inadvertently cause wreck to the buildings while busy
at measuring and taking notes. Meanwhile, in the center of the scene an
anthropomorphous skyscraper arises, literally gutted. Showing the
ambiguous relationship between man and his built environment, the cover
image aptly summarizes the content of the book. It is also its
counterpoint: the strong colors of the outside are toned down in the
inside, reduced into a single-color spectrum of different tones that
change in each story, harmoniously enriching and enhancing (amplifying)
the original black and white art, occasionally tarnished by dot-pattern
graytones.

The musical undertones of these terms I used (harmonious, amplify), with their visual/sonic ambivalence are not casual, since sound, as well as architecture, is an important (and destabilizing) presence in the book: a thin red thread, an underlying, almost imperceptible vibration that subtly ties the different stories together.

Time, space, statistics, and the flow of data are the core elements of this science fiction of explicitly Ballardian echoes; short slice-of-life tales that depict the bewilderment of the Western man who has become deprived of his senses and feelings, alone and adrift in the intact, deserted architectural/urban ruins of an immanent future. With his algid style, a thin black line which can get efficiently denser, Kaczynski suggests that the Apocalypse is already here, in the present, ready to renew itself day after day in a world where the boundaries of time and space don't exist anymore, aptly nullified by the end of History.

In Million Year Boom (2008) we are presented with the all-but-innocent conversion of a Corporation into a primitive Nature that has never been innocent itself: in the end, rather than a metaphor, the logical endpoint of a Capitalism which has internalized the environmental concern, paradoxically revealing in the process its intrinsic predatory nature.

976 Sq. ft. (2007) deals with the destabilizing impact that the construction of a big residential tower on the psyche of the residents of a small neighborhood surrounded by freeways and ramps, which glides over them as the prelude to an imminent gentrification process.

The aptly titled story The New, on the other hand, plays with establishing a new mythology of the City and underlines the mythopoietic power of architecture, offering one of the most striking depictions of a dystopian megalopolis to be found in a comic book.

These are just three examples of the kind of stories collected in Beta Testing the Apocalypse, a book with an elegant and agile format, immediate in its communicative ability, and extraordinarily dense in its content. An essential reading.

venerdì 8 febbraio 2013

The peculiarity of Tom Kaczynski's comics collection Beta Testing the Apocalypse is mirrored in the peculiar editing of the book itself. The opening graphic summary traces the spatial and temporal coordinates of each story, disclosing/revealing surprising narrative constellations whereas the unusual closing index highlights directly the author's cultural references hinted at in the book. The brightly coloured flexicover shows a miniature cityscape generated by a globalized architectural imagination and aptly summarize the content of the narrative. Time, space, statistics, data flows are the core elements of these explicitly ballardian science fiction stories which depict the bewilderment of the Western man, deprived of senses and feelings, alone and adrift in the intact ruins of an immanent future. Kaczynski's algid style, his thin line which can efficaciously densify, depicts an already present and continuously renovating Apocalypse. The result is a book with an elegant format, an immediate communicative power and an extraordinarily dense content.
An essential reading.